Life insurers sell savings contracts with surrender options, which allow policyholders to prematurely receive guaranteed surrender values. These surrender options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Hence, higher interest rates raise surrender rates, as we document empirically by...

In an experiment on investors' financial decisions, we find variations in information can induce distinct signals-beliefs-decisions chains within agents. Subjects observe the time series of a risky index and of an additional signal, which helps predict returnsin some randomly chosen rounds, and...

I explain the credit card debt puzzle – the co-holding of high-cost debt and low-yield liquid assets – with a household and individual determinant that lower debt repayments. At the household level, co-holding is consistent with intra-household frictions. Couples co-hold 40 percent more than...

Uncertainty and monetary policy decisions in the U.S. interact with one another. Contrary to the common notion that FOMC announcements resolve a non-trivial amount of economic uncertainty, we find that the announcement commands a sizable left-tail premium, which builds up a few days in advance....

We offer evidence that the tendency of high real-investment stocks to underperform others is driven by firms physically constructing new capacity. The conditioning ability of construction work does not come from differences in investment intensity, financing sources, or profitability. Yet, it...

When examining information flow into prices, empirical literature usually focusses on direct conduits such as order submissions. Meanwhile, theory suggests that market conditions should have substantial additional effects. Empirical analyses of such effects are methodologically challenging and...

We use textual analysis to measure the growing concern about climate issues and to assess its impact on stock prices in the United States. Using a dataset of 71,785 articles published in The Wall Street Journal from 2010 to 2019, we create several scores capturing media coverage of environmental...

Risk-adjusted momentum returns are usually estimated by constructing momentum portfolios and then running a full-sample regression of their returns on a set of factors (portfolio-level risk adjustment). This approach implicitly assumes constant factor exposure of the momentum portfolio. However,...

Divestitures often accompany acquisitions, representing on average 33% of the acquisition value. Relying on a global sample, we provide support for the efficient restructuring view of acquisition-related divestitures. On average, acquisition-related divestitures are associated with an increase...

I study how (VaR-based) financial constraints affect liquidity and welfare under different structures of the arbitrage industry. When capital is spread across numerous competitive arbitrageurs, financial constraints may impair their ability to provide liquidity, lowering other investors'...